mpQUAD: Multipath Quad TCP Congestion Control in FANETs

AIMD (Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease) and CUBIC (Cubic Congestion Control) are the two commonly used algorithms for network congestion control in the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). AIMD and CUBIC can control the data transfer rate between the UAV and the ground station or other UAVs in a swarmed network. This is particularly important for real-time applications using flying adhoc networks (FANET), such as surveillance or monitoring, where timely data delivery is critical. Multiptah TCP utilizes individual subflows to implement congestion control. Nevertheless, the default congestion management mechanism for subflows in an MPTCP connection uses a linked increase adaptation technique to prevent the congestion window from rapidly expanding due to subflows independently developing their own congestion windows. The throughput of MPTCP connections may decline if fast algorithms like CUBIC TCP are employed in high speed congested network. This work proposes mpQUAD, a novel CUBIC TCP-based high-speed congestion management technique for MPTCP. It exposes specific control parameters of the algorithm to tweak the systems TCP congestion control behavior. The sender’s congestion window can be controlled by changing the multiplicative factor and the rate at which it grows, by the user. The throughputs of MPTCP flows decrease in the conventional congestion control algorithms. The limited bandwidth and high mobility of FANETs can cause significant delay, which the proposed congestion control algorithm mpQUAD can mitigate.